As Facebook ramps up to launch the App Center, the company is preparing new ways for developers to monitor their app’s performance. One of the big points with the App Center is that apps that are well-liked move towards the top of the page. Disliked apps will move to the bottom or even just straight up vanish from the listings.
The new rating parameters will show up in Facebook Insights. The first addition is the ability to rate apps. Every app will feature a little rating card where users can give an app one to five stars. It’s the closest we’re ever going to get a dislike button so be sure to take advantage of it.
Developers will be interested to know that Facebook will not only be tracking the ratings through the card, but a full fledged Insights chart. It will track the amount of stars your app receives from various users and plot them based on the number of stars you receive. The example shows an overwhelming selection of five star ratings, but I know the Internet too well for that. People are going to one star bomb a lot of the more popular apps on Facebook.
If that wasn’t enough, they will also break down your star ratings by demographic. That’s right, not only will Facebook tell you that an overwhelming amount of people gave your app three stars, but that most of those three stars ratings came from the tiny island nation of Samoa.
If there’s one thing that the Internet likes more than giving one stars to perfectly fine products, it’s leaving negative feedback for products. There will be a new chart in Insights that will track the amount of negative attention your app has received including those who hide stories from your app, mark them as spam, or even blocking the app.
Interestingly enough, Facebook will be using their spam filter to monitor the amount of negativity emanating towards your app. This information will be compared against the total number of impressions to give you a good idea of how many people love your app compared to how many people hate it.
Finally, you can also use breakout dashboards to analyze specific content. With content streams, you can see how users and non-users are interacting with content. Open Graph stories can be analyzed down to specific action or object types. These options will allow developers to get down into the nitty gritty of Facebook options.
Jokes about small island nations and one star bombing aside, these are great new tools for developers. The App Center is going to change a lot of things within the app experience for the user and the developer. These tools are an excellent bridge between the two that allows the user to directly tell the developer how they feel.